> The preamble is straightforward: “How comfortable would you be talking about your mental health and emotional well-being with each of the following?"
Seems like a pretty broken premise, ranking comfort instead of what you expected to help most. Also related, people are typically more comfortable confessing to strangers or under circumstances that won't endanger an existing relationship, which seems like a big part of why confession is anonymous. Self-reporting here is probably basically the same as asking "according to your community norms, how are you supposed to answer a question like this?" without much real reveal
Do you go home and talk to your spouse? Do you go to church and talk with your pastor? Do you go to your therapist or to the local bar?
> Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.
I'm skeptical. Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states. It's hard enough to get poorer, less educated men comfortable going to the doctor, let alone a therapist.
> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
> Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states.
Just as a curiosity, as I don't have any experience of red states myself, how easy would it be for a closet homosexual to come out and get support from their bar, churches and friends in a red state, typically?
Less hard than for a straight white Christian to out himself in California, thank you. And the problem is so egregerious that there's an entire episode of Silicon Valley, the series about the startup culture that we all swim in, about it.
I feel for the straight white Christian as a fellow human, and wish them support (I donate to organizations that provide crisis support, but this does not scale, we need more scale [community building via robust government support imho]), but also recognize that religious belief is rapidly declining in the US [1], ~100k churches are anticipated to close over the next 5-10 years [2], and so while this support should be provided to the religious folks who need it, it is not a growing or long term support need [3] (imho) from a systems thinking perspective. Citations below for this area of the knowledge graph.
TLDR This is a human support capacity and capability issue.
> The means are denoted in red, and you can see that most of the numbers are at least 55 years old. For instance, the average adult member of an Episcopal church is 61 years old. For Southern Baptists, it’s 58. The Assemblies of God are doing a bit better on this metric at 54.
> But look at the modal age for a lot of these groups—this is probably the most important metric when it comes to understanding the future of American Protestant Christianity. For many, the modal age is significantly higher than the mean. In a bunch of mainline Protestant denominations, it’s between 67 and 69 years old. For the Assemblies of God, the modal age is 69, which is 15 years older than the mean.
> What does this mean? Well, the mean can be pulled down by a decent chunk of younger folks. If you have a good core of 30-year-olds, they can counterbalance those 60-year-olds in that calculation. That’s not true for the mode. It gives you a much better sense of when “the tipping point” is going to come.
[4] The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026 ("So why do overall levels of attendance decline? Well, because each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. That’s the main driver of religious decline—it’s a decay function across cohorts.")
As an atheist, this topic is one of many that stays on my mind and keeps me awake sometimes.
This whole blog is fascinating, assuming that you're interested in the intersection between (recent) history, demographics, politics, and religion in the US.
Is the true in America? I’m in the UK, and while social isolation, particularly for men is probably worse than it was, I think many, myself included, have at least one person we can turn to in times of crisis. Or am I in a bubble?
Precovid social isolation was the same in US and UK. [0] This investigation have numbers that say that Brits are experiencing more social isolation than untitedstateians. [1]
The author of this piece, Ryan Burge, typically relies data that is scoped to the US for his pieces (to the best of my knowledge). You would have to reach out to him to inquire about the UK, if any similar data is available for analysis, etc. With that said, the ARDA appears to have global data available at https://thearda.com/
> This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.
(Ryan also wrote "The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us," which I highly recommend; he is exceptionally data driven within this domain, no affiliation besides subscribing to his Substack)
This is absolutely true in america. My partner left me and my social life has completely collapsed. I have nobody to talk to when things get difficult. I am estranged from my father, my mother is disabled and requires increasing medical support. I'm an only child, I have no local family.
Once the floor drops out from under you there is nothing to stop the rapid decent to nothingness. There is a generation of discarded people who have nobody left. When we lose our last threads of social connection there's no way back. Beyond hopeless.
I think it helps to live in a city. The cities have their problems, they're expensive and dirty, but there are loads of older single adults, and even an introvert can sit at the same bar once a week and meet people, or go to meetups or a weekly class and slowly meet people. Hell, in bad times even chatting with a bartender was nice.
Being in your shoes in a suburban setting surrounded by families and neat little houses (or huge fields in a country setting) I imagine is hard. I'm only making assumptions.
Have you thought about traveling long weekends or abroad longer? Perfectly doable solo.
Learning how to develop a social network independently is a skill. If your partner leaving you collapses your social life, do you live in a small town where the narrative has turned against you, or did you simply rely on them to be the adult in the room and set up playdates for you like you're a child?
Go to bookclubs.com and start a book club, or join a book club, or go to a local library and do any of the social stuff. Go to a crochet club, even empty-handed, chances are the fiber arts people will have plenty to spare. These are friendships that have to be forged and worked on day in and day out to strengthen them, like a sword.
The plight can be quite real but when people say they have no social life what they're not saying is what sort of social life do they want? What do they want to do while being social with people?
If you have the money, you could always hire escorts. Eventually you'll find one you click with and you can develop a friendly working relationship with a beautiful woman who will listen to all your problems and if she's smart, even maybe give you a valuable outside perspective on what you're experiencing.
I'm part of Freemasonry. All members are at least vested for criminal conducts, my lodge at least is very strict on background investigation, so it's easier to pick trustworthy brothers to talk to. I'm probably one the youngest members and benefitted from wisdom and patience from older brothers. I'm not a church member but that would be a good alternative.
Seems like a pretty broken premise, ranking comfort instead of what you expected to help most. Also related, people are typically more comfortable confessing to strangers or under circumstances that won't endanger an existing relationship, which seems like a big part of why confession is anonymous. Self-reporting here is probably basically the same as asking "according to your community norms, how are you supposed to answer a question like this?" without much real reveal
Do you go home and talk to your spouse? Do you go to church and talk with your pastor? Do you go to your therapist or to the local bar?
> Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.
I'm skeptical. Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states. It's hard enough to get poorer, less educated men comfortable going to the doctor, let alone a therapist.
Also missing from this perspective. What do people who are not from western countries do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Just as a curiosity, as I don't have any experience of red states myself, how easy would it be for a closet homosexual to come out and get support from their bar, churches and friends in a red state, typically?
TLDR This is a human support capacity and capability issue.
Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916273 - November 2025 (1 comment)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 (citations)
[3] When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead? - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-mem... - January 29th, 2026
> The means are denoted in red, and you can see that most of the numbers are at least 55 years old. For instance, the average adult member of an Episcopal church is 61 years old. For Southern Baptists, it’s 58. The Assemblies of God are doing a bit better on this metric at 54.
> But look at the modal age for a lot of these groups—this is probably the most important metric when it comes to understanding the future of American Protestant Christianity. For many, the modal age is significantly higher than the mean. In a bunch of mainline Protestant denominations, it’s between 67 and 69 years old. For the Assemblies of God, the modal age is 69, which is 15 years older than the mean.
> What does this mean? Well, the mean can be pulled down by a decent chunk of younger folks. If you have a good core of 30-year-olds, they can counterbalance those 60-year-olds in that calculation. That’s not true for the mode. It gives you a much better sense of when “the tipping point” is going to come.
[4] The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026 ("So why do overall levels of attendance decline? Well, because each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. That’s the main driver of religious decline—it’s a decay function across cohorts.")
As an atheist, this topic is one of many that stays on my mind and keeps me awake sometimes.
How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)
Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)
For example - this one about generations and trust was surprising to me: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/gen-z-doesnt-trust-any...
or this on perception of the religiosity of holidays: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/is-christmas-a-religio...
[0] https://publica.org.au/wp-content/uploads/DiJulio-et-al.-Lon...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.
Code for this post can be found at https://gist.github.com/ryanburge/0895d855fdc93c3ce26b034349...
(Ryan also wrote "The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us," which I highly recommend; he is exceptionally data driven within this domain, no affiliation besides subscribing to his Substack)
https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587436697_the-...
Once the floor drops out from under you there is nothing to stop the rapid decent to nothingness. There is a generation of discarded people who have nobody left. When we lose our last threads of social connection there's no way back. Beyond hopeless.
Enjoy your bubble. america is completely fucked.
Being in your shoes in a suburban setting surrounded by families and neat little houses (or huge fields in a country setting) I imagine is hard. I'm only making assumptions.
Have you thought about traveling long weekends or abroad longer? Perfectly doable solo.
Sorry for you situation and stay strong.
Go to bookclubs.com and start a book club, or join a book club, or go to a local library and do any of the social stuff. Go to a crochet club, even empty-handed, chances are the fiber arts people will have plenty to spare. These are friendships that have to be forged and worked on day in and day out to strengthen them, like a sword.